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Korean Restaurant at Teemall

Location: 5th floor, Teemall

Sorry about the lack of location for this review. I totally forgot to take a business card when I left so now I can’t remember the name of the restaurant. It’s not on the Teemall website either…however, no worries, you aren’t missing much by avoiding this place.

So yesterday, my dad and I decided to head to lunch at one of the restaurants on the 5th floor at Teemall after some shopping. I should have known that it was a bad move since most restaurants in these big name shopping centres are pretty mediocre but for convenience’s sake we went anyways.

We choose a rather non-descript Korean restaurant located in a corner next to the large food court with Cafe de Coral and what-not. It was a fairly small restaurant compared to the ones surrounding it, and there wasn’t a lot of people when we got there at around noon.

We got seated and they served us rice tea, which was pretty good. It had that nice burnt-rice flavour.

After we placed our orders they served us the banchan. There were five types: boiled baby bak choy (which I forgot to take a photo of but you can probably imagine how it looks like), liver, kimchi, white fungus, and these fried sugary crisps. The bak choy was just boiled bak choy, nothing special at all. The liver was marinated in spicy oil…I didn’t taste any. The kimchi was average. The white fungus was interesting; it had this sweet-sour taste to it. Never had fungus like that before. And the sugar crisps…didn’t taste any either.

Very soon our entrees came. I ordered a traditional dolsot bibimbap and my dad ordered a dolsot bibimbap with fish roe. Our orders came with kimchi soup and gochujang, the red pepper paste with which you mix into the rice.

Dolsot bibimbap; Sorry, I mixed it before remembering to take a photo…I need to get better at this…

Fish roe bibimbap

Kimchi soup

Frankly put, the bibimbaps were terrible. The ingredients weren’t very fresh. The rice was dry and the egg yolk on my dolsot bibimbap had a thin dry crust on it, clearly indicating that it’s been sitting around for a while. They also didn’t heat the stone pots up long enough so the rice formed absolutely no crust on the sides of the bowl. That, in my opinion, totally defeats the purpose of stone pot rice. I sent my order back to be reheated but even so not much crust was formed due to the looseness of the rice. Terrible.

We also ordered a Three Colours Vegetable Salad that I again forgot to take a photo of. But really it was just boiled bean sprouts, greens, and a twiggy vegetable that I don’t know the name of. Very mediocre.

It was a very disappointing meal, and the prices weren’t cheap either. The bibimbaps costed 48 and 58 RMB and the Three Colours Vegetable Salad costed 36 RMB. The lesson of the day: don’t eat here!